


Talk to Me

by Celticas



Series: Trope Bingo [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: CC Trope Bingo, M/M, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-17 01:24:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21046007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celticas/pseuds/Celticas
Summary: Three little words shouldn't mean so much.





	Talk to Me

A presence dropped down on the warm stone steps. A weighty shadow beside him. Protective without being oppressive. For a long time they sat in silence, watching as the school buses filled with students laughing and shouting their good-byes, a long summer stretching out before them. They were the silent sentinels, watching over the yellow monstrosities as they lumbered out into the neighborhood, their loads safely cocooned behind metal and tempered glass.

“Talk to me.” Phil was the first to break the silence, almost pleading. The fragile detente that had been hanging between them all day, broken with the words. 

The smaller boy hunched further into his too big hoodie. For four short syllables, they sure sent a crash of contradicting emotions through him. The meaning a closely held secret. The only person who knew what they meant him had abandoned him when CPS came sniffing around the Circus. Barney had been eighteen, he could have claimed guardianship. Instead his older brother had ghosted, another person in a long time of people who had looked at Clint Barton and seen a problem that wasn’t worth the effort to fix. 

The one person other person who knew that those three words were indelibly inked into his skin in perfect loops and whirls across the bone of his left him. The one person other person who knew that his soulmate would ask something of him that everyone else told him not to do. 

Even the person who they belonged to didn’t know. Clint knew his own words were scrawled in his messy hand just below Phil’s elbow. “And say what?” A stupid sentence. Clint always had something to say, why was he asking for direction? Because of this moment he had never told the other boy that he carried the matching mark. Because he knew he would have to walk away.

Any good thing that came into Clint Barton’s life, inevitable left soon after.

“They’re moving me.” Three for three. So much meaning packed into less than half a breath. Goodbye, and I’ll miss you, and sorrow and fear so deep there weren’t words to express them. The family CPS had put him with in this little bucolic town had been nice, but old. Too old to look after a teenager for more than a few months. Their last good deed before their grown, biological children shuffled them into a nursing home to be locked up and forgotten.

Without waiting for Phil to say anything, promises of writing that would only last for a few weeks, two months tops, or half formed plans for his own family, struggling on a single salary, to take him in.

His feet moved him down the road without conscious direction. Each scuffed step, putting another few inches of distance between himself and the person the universe was meant to promise to him forever. Just one more broken promise.

= + =

Clint huddled in his nest and listened to the other agents yell and scream at each other over the comm line. Automatic gunfire rattled under the SHIELD team’s chaos. He carefully ignored it all. Letting the sound seep and settle into the back of his mind. White noise that was more familiar than the ocean noise machines that normal people used. 

A new voice cut into the cacophony. “Talk to me.”

Clint’s breath stuttered at the words. The arrow he was loosing, missing its target by a fraction of an inch at the unintended change in air pressure against the string. The voice was deeper than he remembered, whether from actual change or a hazing of memory over time, he didn’t know. The calm confidence was the same. 

Did Phil know it was him on the other end of the line? Was he even talking to SHIELD’s newest, most troublesome asset? Did he even know Clint was with the Agency? Did he remember the broken Circus freak that he had been friends with for three months more than two decades ago?

“Target Down.” Agent Halliwell, the spotter for the mission, said before Clint could articulate any of the thoughts that were running in circles around his mind.

Silently Clint stood on the thin beam of wood he had been using and ran along the underside of the warehouses roof as the thugs he had been watching finally realised the Boss was down. The floor level doors crashed open and an army of agents flooded the building. Forgotten, Clint jumped and climbed his way down to the waiting SUVs.

“Probationary Agent Barton.” Agent Tanner stood outside the control van, waiting for Clint to come to him. The scowling man was Clint’s current handler and seemed to resent the assignment. Clint wasn’t sure why.

“Sir.” He stood at careful attention, eyes forward and back straight, he knew SHIELD was his last chance, the only thing standing between him and a prison sentence he couldn’t say he didn’t at least partially deserve. He didn’t try to make trouble, it always found him anyway.

“Clint?” Without the slight static of the comm line, his voice was richer. A velvet that wrapped around Clint’s mind and reminded him of warm spring days scented with jasmine that had grown under the highschool windows. The shock of recognition mixed with confusion answered all of Clint’s questions. Phil did remember him, and he hadn’t known they worked for the same people.

To be fair, Clint had only known for a week or so after catching a few of the mid-level Agents passing around stories of the infallible, Agent’s Agent, Phil Coulson.

Forgetting Tanner, Clint turned. Meeting the blue eyes that still haunted his dreams he took a single step closer. Yearning was clear in the other man’s eyes. The bond thrumming between them in a way it hadn’t when they were teens. He knew what he had to do.

“And say what.” He gave the words back, completing the circuit.

Maybe this time Clint would get to keep the good things the universe was giving him.


End file.
